


Space and the Stars

by orphan_account



Category: Homestuck
Genre: A Metric Fuckload of Metaphors, Death, M/M, Pale Romance | Moirallegiance, Seaside Musings, Sober Gamzee, palemance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-10-20
Updated: 2014-10-20
Packaged: 2018-02-21 21:48:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,499
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2483591
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There's someone nameless in the water and you are concerned about whether the not breathing thing is negotiable.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Space and the Stars

You ever seen what Horrorterror ink darkness looks like, when it comes in blacker than what hides inside your eyelids, and thicker than a palm to smother breath from undeserving lungs? Cause it doesn’t look like darkness. It is very, very hard to identify in its profundity. Looks a little different to everyone.

To you, it looks like a rainbow. Hell, nobody said it couldn’t be beautiful, watching your own destruction.

Right now you’re missing some colors, so this ain’t the real serious kind of dark. It’s just your chest heaving and your bloodpusher giving spastic jerks in your chest, and the skin of your palms going shivery with pain because you had more cuts on them than you realized—and this is saltwater. This is a kind of peace. That is what you are telling yourself.

The sea foam drenches his hair and it doesn’t look real. It looks like a chemical spill—and your fingers just end up there naturally. You’re feeling for anything solid, but foam don’t do nothing but melt. Gotta use those ganderbulbs instead. Capture the moment. Remember all its transient importance.

You stare until not-blinking aches all the way to your jaw.

Seawater beads up into droplets of light in those eyelashes of his. Long, huh. Spider’s legs. Wasn’t long ago that you’d have needed to dig the rubbery-soft squishing out of those sockets to check for insects (ten minutes? Twenty?). But right now you can tell that imperceptible difference and you’re just kind of thrown by how long those eyelashes are.

…Who told those suckers to get all elongated like that? Seems like stuff would get caught in there. Stuff like these droplets of light. Tangled, clinking, and then splitting away like a dislodged asteroids.

All of a sudden, you’ve got this belly-deep hiccup kinda feeling wishing you had a better head for inconveniences.

Wasn’t _convenient_ how he cried the wrong color.

Wasn’t _convenient_ how he was all knotted up emotion and detonation after detonation with you trying so hard to keep your teeth clamped shut on the welling panic in your guts.

Wasn’t _convenient_ how it made these sick, shaky feelings swell up in you even though you couldn’t be thinking like that. Quadrant rejection wouldn’t do you the least bit of good. You ignored every sob.

But them raw-meat ruby tears probably got stuck in there too, didn’t they? You should have commemorated the moment. Should have been there, you weak-ass motherfucker. Sins are for weighing and you know that well, and sober is for paying.

Foam breaks over your fingers to shoo your grimace. It works well enough that your vision clears. The peace holds. No more rainbows.

_Shhhhhh_.

The sea never fails to calm you from thoracic cage to pedifronds. Maybe it’s how deep you can breathe. Every cell exhales, one by one. A little military march of life, breathing, breathing, breathing. He ain’t breathing and you ain’t looking too hard. Your hand is sinking in the swampy sand, a little deeper with every wave sucking the ground out from under you, and you ain’t movin’ and the tide ain’t stopping and he ain’t getting up, ain’t opening those ganderbulbs, still ain’t—

_Shhhhhhh_.

_Think on something else_ , you urge yourself. Your blood pusher is beating harder than you’d like. Better yet, think of nothing at all.

(Can you?)

_Brother was moving all of two seconds past._

(You can’t.)

Back when the world hadn’t yet died in fire-filled craters and the weight of your regrets—there was this thing you knew about that no one else did. He liked the sea.

You talked about it, once, and no onehad been in on the conversation because he wasn’t having to tell you all the ways your miracles were wrong. Naw, you were _telling_ him, you were writing the smoothest of slam poetry to his computer screen, and you got your fingers hurting typing that fast. You and your tears both hurting, given that you were discussing the ocean instead of going to splash through it. You’d been getting your practice on about avoidance well before you watched your best friend break down into tears with yellowblood dripping down his elbows. Your lusus taught you.

You ever tried to memorize all the shapes the light makes when it shatters on the water? Or the exact curve of the waves sucking in on their own breaths like wrigglers, or that feeling you get bare-footed and hop-limp-running at the sand cause them shell shards hurt like a bitch but the sand feels good because it ain’t the bottom of your shoes? It’s something sun-baked and little and big together at once. That kind of thing.

His miracle of an answer were these two words typed at you. ‘I know.’ No fanfare, no real reply. Ain’t that what people do when they ain’t listening?

But it wasn’t like him to leave you space for anything but laughing and arguing because that was his way, that was his gift. That time, he did. And you, through the film of the drugs and tears, realized that maybe, he really did know. Yeah, he _knew_ what the ocean was and you could feel it in your gut like you’d done something wrong. And he left you the space to keep on telling him. Never got your thinkpan around it, but you must have kept telling him all night, because you woke up drooling on your keyboard.

Now he leaves you the space to hover over him, encased in the grasping, slick sand because you crouch over him and bracket all those prickles and angles with your arms and the tide just won’t stop coming in. His sweater’s snagged in a couple of places, and those threads are snaking around in the brown-green-blue of the water (all depends on your perspective). His skin looks near white with how hard the light is beating down. Looks sun-bleached, like a shell—or a lusus.

_Shhhhh_.

Your chest squeezes.

Ever since you explained why there was no one beating you away from the sopor like his dad musta done, you were the victim of his heavy-handed concern. Mutter it bitter to yourself because he sure as motherfuck never tried to be pale _beyond_ the lip-service of it. Cause this fucker, messiah-in-training, was so convinced he could hand you a diamond and that would be the end of all your misbehaving and mischief. Like it was that easy. Like he could rewrite you to fit his hero parable and his mutant claws.

But that is a motherfucking crock.

Truth being that you still ain’t clear on why he offered you the pale he didn’t feel—but you still know _that_ noise wasn’t what he was trying to do, and you always feel a little lesser for turning your thoughts in that direction. He was never that way.

If you were paying any kind of attention past the haze of rainbows and old hurt, you’d be zoning out on the flickering shadows that are itty-bitty fish, or the sneaky gaps the shells make when they bury themselves (good eating too, if you dig up enough), or the birds panting their half-songs overhead. Maybe even jellyfish. They got em here? Shit, if they do, that’s even better reason not to move. Got to keep him from getting swept out to sea, got to keep the stingers offa him.

That’s why you’re just sitting here, right. Watching him not breathing while the tide laps up a little higher around you two every second? You guard him from the motherfucking jellyfish.

Bloodpusher beating so hard it hurts your chest, you guard him.

He doesn’t look half as big as he usually does drenched and with the water flooding over his nose. Not that he ever gives the impression of terrible bigness—how much must he puff himself up trying to get people shuffling out of his space? You’ve suddenly got this real demanding urge to lay your head on his chest even though it ain’t moving. Maybe it will if you push some. You scoop a little more foam off of him.

Messiahs, you can feel that familiar dark all the way in your bones, where you are stained with the beauty of blood. A planet on your conscience, and your friends, and the colorless, fragile pulse of his trust. You are guilt itself. The shadows dig in so very, very deep. They run from your eyes, from the sweat of your pores, from the strength in your skeleton. You belong to them. You see them every hour.

You scoop some more foam off of him, just trying to breathe, and _shh-shhh-shhhh_ the ocean tells you.

There was this one time way back, before even that conversation with the sea, when Terezi teased you if you had yourself a flushcrush on this troll right in front of you. Ain’t a one of you thinking like that—all wrigglers and post-grub confusion. Quadrants were easily dismissed. You didn’t have much to say then.

You still don’t. This thing—it ain’t a crush. And it ain’t necessarily flush, it ain’t—you don’t think anyone ever wrote down words for it. Sometimes you change your mind in the same day. Does that urge to orbit him mean you want to avoid him, or gut him last, or gut him first, or glue yourself up against him and see if you can’t fool this brother into smiling? He ain’t never been like the sea—you don’t get into him. You don’t splash around, you don’t have him, you don’t play in all this. He’s a star. He’s far away and too different and he ain’t breathing and it’s _always_ been that way, you think.

Cause if it wasn’t, see, that alternative is too painful to contemplate. Then it’s your fault that he’s still in the sand and the water goes over him and the breaths don’t come. Then you did this to him. Then you sacrificed him to the dark and fed him to it and he’s nothing but a scrap of rainbow and the ocean keeps _shhh_ ing you and it is starting to motherfucking **grate**.

…Every minute, you like this less and less. You can hear this sound and you think it might be you making it, or maybe it’s the sighing of the waves. Maybe they can sound like sobbing (lie). And you give in. Your head hits his chest. Wet, solid ‘plap’ of sound. Cold. Cheek stings, because that’s cut too. You don’t got any need to take care of yourself in the darkness, because you only feel pain when there are no rainbows to be had. Your eyes close to the salt, your lips peel back, you clutch fistfuls of sand. You are going to scream before your thoughts go dark. Scream and scream and scream and there will be no one to hear you, you convince yourself, because he is interred in the tide already and not breathing and he was the only one to ever hear you begging for help.

Beneath your cheek, you feel him tense.

Miracles so strong you bite your tongue a little bloody—and the world grants you a little slow motion for a minute. Drip drop eyelashes split and—there. Eyes. Greetings. The gills you can see under the bits of torn-up sweater flare their mutant red and his lips part and he looks… Hell, he looks annoyed. You try to be contrite.

But your bloodpusher is pulsing steady again and you smile up with no conscious will. Push your cheek a little firmer to his chest, but don’t dare move your palms from the sand.

You think he maybe doesn’t have any clue what to do with you either, cause he just puts his hand in your hair while he breathes in the sea. Brother’s giving you some kinda Mohawk. Bitchin. His hands feel wetter than the water, and you like the sound he makes when he moves. Noisy. Feels good going down your auricular canals, like it might leave welts.

He ain’t dead. Course not. Who said anything about dead?

You thought for a minute, watching some Gamespawn performer grab him from behind and force him under the waves—but no. No, somebody got a nasty surprise, and it wasn’t Karkat. You marvel at the gills flickering this close. Before, you marveled at him tearing out of the surf and sending the interloper flying. And your club is probably halfway to the next continent by now, but it was a good throw, right? Got the sucker good. Only what the blasphemer deserves for touching the messiah.

You know it ain’t your call, trying to guard him now. He turned his head towards you when your club flew and dove down under the water fast-like. Thought he’d just swim away. He didn’t.

You gotta wonder if he knows what his playing dead does to all the bits of you that have to tick along to stay alive. _Shhhhh_ , says the water, and it’s easier for you now. You _shhhh_. You quiet and are still and hope that someday someone will make you blind.

He smiles back for a split second, and even if you can’t see the breaths, you feel em better like this. Your eyes want to roll up in your head some, that normal? You realize you’ve spoken aloud when he snorts “fuck no” and then doesn’t continue.

Yeah, _now_ he leaves you the space again. You twirl your fingers into the sand and let the waves chatter because you’re older now and you two are not exactly friends anymore, and you know pretty damn well that he knows. You don’t have to spell it out.

He gives you no poetry, no quadrant, no forgiveness—but he breathes the saltwater and its sobs and you need that to be enough. So it is. And by the time he puts his fingers to your scalp for real and starts kind of petting, you can’t think of any reason better than this to purr your head off. There’s the both of you smiling in the sand—and if the tide washes you out after all, he will probably breathe for you and you will probably forgive for him.

It will be okay, you think, because you can see the stars even when it’s dark out.

It will be okay if you are blind, because you will grow better able to stomach inconvenience.

It will be okay, his is not a light you need eyes to see, or a warmth you need hands to hold. When you are a corpse rotting in the ground, he will lift you up and carry you out to sea and all will be forgiven because they’re wrong, when they talk about lights hitting the water. They don’t. They touch. They hold hands. And they leave all the space anyone could ever want resting still and dark between them.

It will be okay.

**Author's Note:**

> I have literally zero explanations that make any sense.  
> Also, Diamond Edge has an update too, but it needs to be mashed down to a reasonable size first, so. Just know that's a thing


End file.
